The Middle Stone Age begins
African toolkits shift from handaxes to prepared cores, small points and standardised blades.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 25 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 15 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
At Olorgesailie in Kenya the large Acheulean handaxes that had dominated for over a million years give way, by about 320,000 years ago, to smaller, more refined points made with prepared-core techniques. The transition coincides with a period of unusually unstable climate and faunal turnover in the basin. Behavioural flexibility appears to be the response to an environment that would not stay still — the same interval in which our species is emerging.